How To Make Your Own Video Games Like R-Type

R-Type is a classic arcade game where you are a space ship flying in a side view and you blow up all kinds of enemy baddies. R-Type games are in the side scrolling shoot em up genre of games or shmup for short and they are also known as bullet hell games because there are so many projectiles flying around. In this blog post we’re going to show you how to build a similar game using the Pulado make your own games engine. Pulado games can be built and played within the browser and use Adobe Flash as the game client. If you don’t already have an account head over to Pulado.com and create an account and then get to the members area.

Once in the members are you should click New Game and then select “Side Scroller Template” from the template list. Fill in the name, description, and tags for your game in the relevant fields and then click Save. The theme of this template is WWII and not space but it is a side scroller like R-Type. The settings that make it this way are located in the Player Tab and the Opponent Tab mainly.

If you select the Player tab you will see where the player avatar graphic is configured but the main setting here is the Movement setting. You want”Move 360 Degrees Right” which will allow your plane to move and fire to the right. There are a lot of other settings here you can configure like the movement speed of the player and how many lives they should start the game with. You can also scroll farther down and configure the Weapon #1 and Weapon #2 rate of fire, sound, graphic, and projectile velocity. There are other posts here which explain those features in more detail.

On the Opponent tab you want to select “Spawn Right and Move Left” as the movement type. This will make the enemies spawn on the right side of the screen and fly to the left side of the screen (towards the player). They will also fire in that direction. Also on this tab you can change the enemy graphics, the enemy movement speed, and the two weapons that the enemies can have. Additionally, you can choose to have multiple graphics for the enemies (it randomly picks a graphic to use for that enemy each time an enemy spawns). The weapons are is very similar to the player weapons area where you can set the rate of fire and the projectile velocity.

On the Background Tab you can setup the different background layers behind (and above) the player. You can also set the backgrounds to different speedswhich creates a parallax. The scrolling background is a signature feature of R-Type like games. The other relevant tabs which you can also explore to tweak out your game are the Gameplay tab and the Powerup tab. On the Gameplay tab you can configure bosses, hitpoints, and loot among other things. On the Powerup tab you can control which powerups will drop like Rapid Fire and Multi Shot.

And that is all there is to it to start creating your own game like the classic R-Type side scrolling shoot em up. Head over to Pulado and start to make your own game now!